The energy market is going on chain.
Power Ledger, which is a blockchain platform, lets users track, trade and trace renewable energy.
And now it's fully integrated with the Solana blockchain, bringing faster, more scalable energy trading to the network.
Joining me this morning to weigh in is Gemma Green, co-founder and executive chairman for Power Ledger.
Gemma, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
So first and foremost, tell me about taking the energy market on chain.
Uh, well, Power Ledger set up 9 years ago with the idea of allowing, um, uh, households and businesses, energy utilities to be able to track and trace every kilowatt hour of energy, and energy suffers from a bit of a, a greenwash problem where many claims are made about energy that are not true.
And if you can, um, and we do um track every kilowatt hour in terms of time, time, place, and we put it on the Solana blockchain, that um uh provides more traceability and improves confidence and reduces incidence of fraud.
And Gemma, many of us are familiar with Solana, but explain to us how Solana enables Power Ledger and your tokens.
Yeah, so initially actually we were on another blockchain, but we migrated to Solana uh approximately a year ago, um, because the other blockchains that we were experimenting on were very slow, and when you think about the amount of data you're gonna get from a smart meter, In terms of each kilowatt hour, it's large amounts of data.
So you need a blockchain that is super fast, and Solana, our previous blockchain could only that we were using could only process about 15 transactions per second, whereas Solana can process 50,000.
It's also low cost and low energy, and that was really important for us, obviously to keep the cost of electricity low, but also, um, we wanted something that was very energy efficient, particularly as it's an energy use case.
Yeah, and building on what you just said and talking about the technology deepens help map out real world infrastructure projects on blockchain.
So how was Power Ledger interacting on Solana?
Yeah, so we have a tracking and tracing product called Vision, and we also have a dynamic um peer to peer energy trading product as well called XGrid.
Uh, and we have our own token, the Power token, which sits both on Solana and also on the Ethereum blockchain.
Um, and Power Token is used as a payment token.
And also we're also looking at new use cases to integrate it into our product for consumer facing use cases.
So, uh just the vision product is about tra tracing every kilowatt hour, so companies want to know how much renewable energy they're consuming so they can report it, or they can procure more renewable energy to meet particular targets.
Um, and then in terms of peer to peer trading, that is for energy suppliers that wanna, um, bring more power to consumers, and what that actually does is drive down the cost of electricity, and that's quite significant for um the situation that we're in right now where there's such a great growth in demand from AI.
And US, um, for example, in the US data center electricity consumption is projected to rise by 130% to 2030, and electricity bills could increase as much as 70%, and the reason for that is there's more demand than there is supply.
And um as a result of the big beautiful bill, many of the renewable subsidies are going, which actually I think makes sense, removing the subsidies is with good as um because that's causing perverse outcomes on the grid.
But next, what is needed is dynamic pricing rather than flat tariffs, which we've got pretty much in most high income OECD countries around the world.
And I think it's a little bit like the Telecommunication Deregulation Act of 1996.
And when that happened, and you may recall that long distance calls were like 1 or $2 per minute, and when that uh the deregulation Act happened, which was under Clinton, Um, lots of internet service providers, um, were created and the cost came down and the pricing models changed as well.
And I think, um, that we're gonna, we need something like this to incorporate more renewables and more energy into the grid fast without subsidies.
And I think in terms of where that might happen first, I think I'm sorry to interrupt you, but here in New York we are fast approaching the opening bell, so we will have to leave it there.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you.
